nest0r wrote:

I think the site exists because people want to learn kanji, not because it's intrinsically difficult.

...so are there equivalent "reviewing the Greek alphabet" and "reviewing Cyrillic" sites? I would suggest that there aren't, and that this is exactly because the kanji system is intrinsically more difficult (if only because there are two orders of magnitude more of them!)

Last edited by pm215 (2009 December 11, 1:26 pm)

I don't see how it's possible to claim kanji isn't harder than alphabets. Even if you remove the whole deal with how many there are, there's also the issue with how complex they are and how similar they are. Sure, some letters of the alphabet look similar, but why does it matter when there's just a few of them? When you know over 2000 symbols however, it becomes quite annoying when it turns out some of them look very similar.

To learn an alphabet, all you need is a week of rote memorizing and you'll be done for a life time if you keep using it. The same can't be said for kanji, even if you use the most amazing mnemonic techniques in the book.

How did this thread get so far from the original topic?  Pronunciation isn't writing. 

Look: ツ and つ represent the same syllable in normal Japanese writing.  Agreed?  Good.  In English transliterations, either tsu or tu would be used (depending on the system of transliteration) to transcribe this same single syllable.  Agreed?  Good.  (Now how did we get into kanji....?)

That said, those sounds are not the same as an "English tsu" for at least three reasons.  1) the Japanese /t/ is slightly more fronted than the English /t/.  2) The set of sounds, /ts/, always patterns as a single unit in Japanese, unlike as in English where /ts/ can often be separated (i.e. cats -> {cat} + {s}).  3) The Japanese /u/ is pronounced with unrounded lips, unlike the English /u/ which is always pronounced with rounded lips (i.e. like you would position your lips for a kiss).  This combination of factors results in a pronunciation subtly different from the first syllable in the now English word "tsunami." 

Romaji is capable of handling the same sounds that can be represented in kana.  You just have to remember that your pronunciation of those sounds should come from real life contact with the language and not from guesswork.  Even in languages that are normally written in Latin letters, the sounds the same letter represents can vary widely.  To stay with the same letter as an example, an English /t/ is not the same as a Spanish /t/, nor are even the American English /t/ and British English /t/ pronounced exactly the same.  You just have to remember what language you're speaking first and let the letters serve only as a guidebook.

Last edited by jajaaan (2009 December 11, 3:24 pm)

nest0r, no matter what you feel about the beauty of the system, it's a known scientific fact that Japanese and Chinese people have a FAR harder time learning to read and write than ANY culture using an alphabet. In Sweden, there's no one in second grade who can't read and write. Maybe not the latest scientific report, but they can read. The same isn't true in China and Japan.

There is a reason why they are still proposing developing an alphabet in China to promote reading, and it's certainly not because kanji is as easy as alphabets.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2009 December 11, 4:07 pm)

You're still ignoring the facts. When you've learned to read and write the alphabet, you're done. Sure, people make spelling mistakes even when they are old, but they NEVER forget how to write a word. This happens to Japanese and Chinese constantly, regardless of age. They themselves complain about this.

What base do you have, at all, for your "synergistic" ideas? Statistics disprove it. Natives themselves claim otherwise. All the basis I'm seeing are your ideas that you even say your self are based from your own comparisons.

I also fail to see this long-term benefit you claim Japanese have. Yeah, we all know about the myths that kanji can be combined in new fantastic ways to create new words which everyone still understands. However, this doesn't happen in real life. Just like every other language, Japanese has words, and those words are used. The kanji are just a way of representing them and doesn't change the creativity you have. You can create new words in English just as easily as you can in Japanese. The ONLY difference is how much harder it is to read and write.

Should kanji be removed from the language because they are hard to learn? No, but they probably will from evolution alone. Kids don't want to learn it and alphabets prove they don't need to. With the huge impact English has on the world today, this can only give one outcome. The simplification of the hanzi was just a start.

I'm going to try to find more sources to back my claims, but here's something for now:
http://research.goo.ne.jp/database/data/000509/
As you can see, 52% of the Japanese who did the survey are not confident in their own kanji ability.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2009 December 11, 5:27 pm)

Last post on the topic till I post a bunch of links, heh. I've driven myself to learn lots of interesting things with this general topic I've been on the past cpl weeks, but time to sum up and move on to self-studying Japanese. Hope no one felt disrespected, I have considerable respect for you, else I wouldn't bother.

Tobberoth, you accuse me of ignoring facts while I am acknowleding the simplicity of the alphabet and trying to point out you're comparing the incomparable. It's not merely a matter of spelling, though I personally think that having to learn a word through spelling is harder than learning a kanji word, because you have less links, essentially a string of letters that represent sounds. Spelling can be corrected through practice, as can kanji. Pretty easily, too. Kind of hard to misspell a typed kanji. Sometimes simply by accessing the internal sensorimotor routes encoded in memory helps, hence finger-writing's traditional commonality in China/Japan. Are you going to present to me clear proof that there's a higher percentage of kanji-writing problems than spelling problems, and that this primarily denotes the defectiveness of the writing system, rather than reflecting multiple sociocultural/historical factors? Good luck with that, hehe. I will eat my hat if you do. Jinx.

My point is that you're treating kanji and the alphabet equally with regards to reading/writing, when that's not how literacy works--I've never intuitively thought that, but until recently didn't bother confirming with modern theories.

Kanji's iconic status and its meaning are more closely related than with the alphabet. Forget the ideogram myths and pre-'90s beliefs about brain hemispheres for a moment. Most studies on kanji/kana, I will humbly suggest, say kanji is processed in more ventral/visual areas of the brain as gestalt wholes, this form of orthography has direct access to meaning, operating independently of yet interrelated with sound to meaning routes. I feel this is a much better balance than the phonetic orientation of the alphabet, where you're essentially relying on a single route to meaning and vice versa. Even if I didn't think this was practically true based on the brain/mind as network, I would think it was true in the sense of how communication might evolve in a speculative way, but I won't rely on speculation alone. That it to say, my intuitions about how writing best operates with more egalitarian treatment of the visuospatial is actually based on my English views, not Japanese research, though this has clarified things for me.

Look into dual/triple coding for some examples of models developed since the late '70s, though sadly it's taken time for research into kana/kanji to stop being subordinated to universal phonology claims originating from alphabetical conceptions of reading. Not surprising, since much of the linguistic influence on Japan/China, from what I understand, originated from overseas.

Statistics disprove my 'synergistic' claims? What statistics? My base for these claims are purely cognitive research-based--see supra-additive integration (or multisensory integration), 'levels of processing', any number of tangents based on those references alone will turn up tonnes of 'theories of mind' that seem oriented towards parallel distributed processing... and I check them against (what little there is once you stop believing the 99% claims and rethink notions of literacy to embrace 'multiliteracy') information on Japanese literacy and my own experience in learning. I admit that my own experience isn't the same as general education, but I don't think they're incompatible. I've seen nothing to prove me wrong or even suggest to me that I'm not on the right track. I suppose I can't hope to match your anecdotal native buddies' claims, though. ;p

I have cited no myths about, uh, whatever you were saying, nor mentioned creativity, though I do think that regardless of your writing system, taking advantage of how the brain works and studying to process/integrate information better, esp. as regards working memory, makes for better thinking and use of language, as I view language to be an emergent property of mind and environment interacting.

As for that survey... I've posted links here to similar surveys from Goo/WhatJapanThinks about how Japanese folks feel their kanji-writing ability is declining as they type more, while their use and recognition of kanji increases or remains the same via the IME. Personally, I feel, as I posted recently in another thread, there's still value to writing/空書 for mental retention, and also I'm interested in how continued increase in kanji use via computers will affect the language. How will the language evolve? I think it will be more and more shaped around the interface design of computers...

Last edited by nest0r (2009 December 11, 6:34 pm)

jajaaan wrote:

nest0r wrote:

re: Tobbs/yudantaiteki:

IMHO The visuospatial-semantic complexity of kanji and how it's processed in parallel to kana and the benefits that multimodality brings with effort, including the criss-crossing efficiency of pattern-recognition in context for lexical/grammatical processing, broad semantic priming/cueing factors, added nuance of thought and expansion of working memory, and less dependence on speech to communicate meaning through writing which creates a gradient of literacy rather than rigid layers, all this as you learn far outweighs the benefits of a simple alphabet system alone, striving to memorize grapheme-to-phoneme spellings of words, often irregular and illusory, and channeling information on a primarily single orthographic-phonetic-semantic route that relies on an orthography that requires you to process single letters on a flat horizon before doing so.

For the benefit of everybody reading this forum, could you please take a minute to revise what you write next time before pell-mell clicking on that "Submit" button?  See all the bolded words?  Those are jargon words and other technical noun clauses packed into a big fat list that forms the subject of your sentence.  See the blue word hidden in the middle of that huge mess?  That's the verb of your sentence.  Kind of important.  Consider placing that someplace where we can see it next time.  A good rule of thumb is to keep the verb within the first 6-8 words of a sentence.

When you've said or done something, writing-wise, to earn my respect, I will acknowledge your recommendations. As it is, I don't force anyone to read or reply, most of my thoughts are clearly part of a continual stream of comments here, building upon one another. People can read or ignore as they like. When I try to make clear broadcasts of potentially useful knowledge or offer specific self-study advice, I do so quite well, in my humble opinion. You ought to take into consideration user and context when offering criticism, as I mentioned when you first 'picked a fight' about some nonsense or other that you're apparently still holding a grudge over. ;p

Last edited by nest0r (2009 December 11, 6:18 pm)

Huh? Seems the discourse has degenerated. I guess we're done here. (Tobberoth's too much time on IRC + jajaaan's juvenile mentality, perhaps?)

Last edited by nest0r (2009 December 11, 6:37 pm)

nest0r wrote:

When you've said or done something, writing-wise, to earn my respect, I will acknowledge your recommendations. As it is, I don't force anyone to read or reply, most of my thoughts are clearly part of a continual stream of comments here, building upon one another. People can read or ignore as they like. When I try to make clear broadcasts of potentially useful knowledge or offer specific self-study advice, I do so quite well, in my humble opinion. You ought to take into consideration user and context when offering criticism, as I mentioned when you first 'picked a fight' about some nonsense or other that you're apparently still holding a grudge over. ;p

@nest0r,
Questioning why some folks derail a thread with petty criticisms of other posters' spelling mistakes isn't picking a fight, and I didn't single out your terribly dense post because of a grudge.  Although it did occur to me that you'd benefit from seeing how a thread you've enjoyed posting in can be so easily derailed by minor criticism, this was secondary to trying to read the thread, coming to your post (series of posts I should say) and not being able to make heads or tails of half of it. 

As to your condition of "earning your respect" and suggestion that I take into consideration the size of your e-peen when offering criticism, you really ought to stop that.  Nobody cares who you are on the internet.  All we care about is what you have to say.  This isn't a social networking site.  I'm not going to ever meet any of the people on this board in real life.  Content is all the majority of us are interested in, and if you can't even word your posts clearly, then you're just another troll.  Now my personal opinion is that you're not a troll.  I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that you do have a point.  This is exactly why I offered you my advice on writing more clearly.

I didn't really read all the posts, but since it's a bit related anyway (to the argument at hand), compare the literacy rates between China and the US, or Japan and France, for example. I think I remembered a statistic being mentioned somewhere while in class, that the literacy rates in Hong Kong was almost 100% while it is not the case in the US.

holy shit nestor you're giving me so much shit to work on.

I'll be back in a week or two with a response.

Last post I swear.

I am saying, have said, a few things you ought to take together to understand me: Kanji is more complicated than the alphabet. But kanji's benefits aren't related to how complex it is to write. Also, I feel that the complexity of kanji doesn't have to make it hard, even if compared to a letter it's 'harder' in that it requires more effort. In fact, some theories, such as the 'levels of processing' effect, suggest that the more elaborate and meaningful the information you encode and rehearse in memory, the easier it is to learn than simpler items--while a kanji vs. a letter doesn't compare, a kanji+kana vs. a string of letters does. I think the methods we use to learn kanji and Japanese in general, images and muscle memory and audio cues, relate to that, and can be used by natives. In fact, I posted elsewhere a link to some sort of 'personal visual cognition' system that uses something similar to the Heisig method, encouraging learners to chunk the radicals into larger and larger pieces until they perceive it as a whole. Similarly I posted links to research on 'orthographic satiation' which suggests kanji are already processed as gestalt wholes, so I think it's on the right track to focus on new ways to combine primitives/radicals until they're encoded as icons.

Science is often shaped by preconceptions/hypotheses, until new research questions the dominant models and is replicated. This has been happening with paradigms for 'reading', ie how word meanings are accessed. But in the '70s, I believe someone named Coltheart did research on 'deep dyslexia' and from there formed a dual-coding model that's been improved upon and experimented with over the years. There's other models such as PDP (parallel distributed processing), integrationism, interactivation theory, whatever. Easily Googled. Researchers often used to think it was purely phonological mediation, ie you could only read and get to meanings through sound. That was based on alphabetic orthography research.

Kanji doesn't operate that way--from many studies that I've read, once you've learned a word with kanji, it--even as kana are processed like letters--is processed more as a visual icon in the brain, and is used to directly access meaning even while it also triggers the sounds you've learned that go with it in context, and even as those sounds also trigger meaning--these routes all interact, depending on how you've learned the words--on a general level. Those are my references to visual-semantic, or orthographic-phonetic, et cetera. Easily Googled.

This 'learning' dependence on how you map script/meaning/sound, by the way, relates to my recommendations to, from the onset, try to integrate senses and suchlike in an SRS. Closely related to conceptions of working memory. We learn better through the integration of multiple senses.

The 'pattern recognition' and 'priming' terms I've referenced is related to how you take in words in context. For example, reading and having the initial kanji trigger semantic associations even as you're processing the rest of the okurigana or other kanji in the compound. I've also recently read about 'cueing' as easing cross-script (kanji/kana) switching during continuous reading.

I don't know how aware natives are of all this any more than English natives can tell you about their reading process, but I know native Japanese have done most of the research I've read. Non-native research I've encountered is mostly on the alphabet, or the ones that were on kanji/kana by non-natives were way back in the '70s/'80s, and closely linked to alphabetic models. Since then, as I've read the psycho/neurolinguistic research, the 'dual coding' model (or 'triple', depending on how you interpret it) seems to have gained dominance. But that's going by my Googling and access to what's online.

So yes, kanji is hard-er if you strip it down to just its orthographic complexity, ie a bunch of strokes vs. a few lines making up a letter or kana, at which point you can say 'oh it's just an overblown alphabet letter' or dismiss it as not being worthwhile. But you should take into account how it relates to words as you learn them, within the system--educational and the media ecology people encounter, as it's used, and I think cognitive research suggests it's quite valuable. I've also read 'anecdotal evidence' that Japanese folks sight-read very easily using kanji. In contrast, we're more dependent on individual letters with strong sound mappings that mediate our access to what words mean. (Edit: Apparently this got cut before:) It's physically impossible for alphabet readers to process words as icons--even the smallest most common ones--this is the current model for reading letters, so each letter must be processed independently and slotted for that heavy phonological mediation. See that Nature article I posted or Dehaene for more.

I feel that if you put together how the brain works, how the brain processes the scripts, and how adaptable learning methods are, and even if strictly speaking you can look at the education system and say 'they're not taking advantage of it' and that's true--this doesn't touch on the *potential* of a logographic/phonogographic system, of Japanese to be easier, after the initial stages of learning the kana. Whether it's easier or not hasn't been quantified, only suggested according to the logic of the alphabet being simpler, then hand-picking sociocultural issues abroad as representing definitive, universal proof of kanji's unjustifiable difficulty.

Likewise, I feel that writing has *never* been subordinate to 'speech', except insofar as people treat it as inferior. For me, that's basic logic, but in terms of the history of writing see perhaps David R. Olson's ch. 4 in The World on Paper, or look into theories about language/the mind. Also see Florian Coulmas or Roy Harris. I wrote on this in the "Why AJATT does not work for my listening skills" thread as well (p. 5). The entwining of literacy/speech since the invention of writing, how it shapes the mind and language, rethinking literacy as 'writing what you mean', even while acknowledging writing's interaction with sound.

I'm not sure how natives use Japanese to express their thoughts, but I imagine that it's physically and abstractly possible to expand the way we communicate by embracing the medium and its different uses of the senses and thus how we internally represent these transmitted thoughts, rather than imposing a perspective on it that neglects how it's actually processed as a writing system.

Edit: Oops, double-click got stuck and cut away some text earlier, hehe.
Edit 2: My next post on the topic will be about 50-100 links, then I'll drop the topic and leave people to conceptualize kanji/writing on their own...

Last edited by nest0r (2009 December 12, 4:37 am)

Tobberoth wrote:

I don't see how it's possible to claim kanji isn't harder than alphabets. Even if you remove the whole deal with how many there are, there's also the issue with how complex they are and how similar they are. Sure, some letters of the alphabet look similar, but why does it matter when there's just a few of them? When you know over 2000 symbols however, it becomes quite annoying when it turns out some of them look very similar.

To learn an alphabet, all you need is a week of rote memorizing and you'll be done for a life time if you keep using it. The same can't be said for kanji, even if you use the most amazing mnemonic techniques in the book.

Words written in the alphabet have pretty much arbitrary spellings. If a person learned the alphabet and spoken English, there is no way they could read written English. In learning English you have to memorize the spelling of practically every word, give or take a few patterns which are shared between certain words. Kanji themselves parallel this. You have to memorize an arbitrary "spelling" for a component of a word. I do not know if the number of Kanji is higher than the number of spelling components in English, but Kanji get the additional benefit of their "spelling" having an approximate meaning.

I would agree that English writing is easier than Japanese writing, but I wouldn't agree that English *spelling* is easier.

I'm also not sure about your claims that Japanese/Chinese elementary school students are less literate than English-speaking ones... that seems doubtful to me.

(About ローマ字 (and the OP), it shouldn't be a language-learning tool, it's for people who don't know the language. I personally think the best strategy is to wean yourself off it as soon as possible)

Last edited by Amset (2009 December 11, 8:06 pm)